Agenda 21

The MDGs in the United Nations Headquarters in New-YorkThe Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are eight international development goals that 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. They include reducing extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS, and developing a global partnership for development.


Background

Heads of State at the Millennium SummitIn 2001, recognizing the need to assist impoverished nations more aggressively, UN member states adopted the targets. The MDGs aim to spur development by improving social and economic conditions in the world's poorest countries.

They derive from earlier international development targets[2], and were officially established at the Millennium Summit in 2000, where all world leaders present adopted the United Nations Millennium Declaration, from which the eight goals were promoted.


Goals

The percentage of the world's population living on less than $1 per day has halved in twenty years. Most of this improvement has occurred in East and South Asia. The graph shows the 1981-2001 period.The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were developed out of the eight chapters of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000. The eight goals and 21 targets include
 

• End Poverty and Hunger

• Achieve universal primary education

• Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.

•  Promote gender equality and empower women

•  Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015.

•  Reduce child mortality

•  Reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate.

• Improve maternal health

• Reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio.

• Achieve, by 2015, universal access to reproductive health.

• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases

• Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.

• Achieve, by 2010, universal access to treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it.

• Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

• Ensure environmental sustainability

• Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources.

• Reduce biodiversity loss, achieving, by 2010, a significant reduction in the rate of loss.

• Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation (for more information see the entry on water supply).

• By 2020, to have achieved a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum-dwellers.

• GOAL 8: DEVELOP A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT
  
   

Home